After a one year break, Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices at the Forum Transregionale Studien was happy to welcome eight new Art Histories Fellows 2018/19 and three CAHIM Fellows to Berlin. During the Welcome Weeks 2018, the fellows met with their co-fellows and were introduced to the partner institutions, such as the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Kunsthistorisches Institut of Freie Universität, the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, as well as to essential aspects of Berlin’s and Germany’s history and art history.
Art Histories Welcome Weeks
Mon 08 Oct 2018 – Tue 30 Oct 2018
Mon 08 Oct 2018 – Tue 30 Oct 2018
Re-examining the Museum: Transregional Shifts in Exhibiting Practices in Berlin and Hamburg
Berlin, Hamburg
In order to become familiar with the city of Berlin, the wider region, and their art historical and architectural dimensions, the program invited the fellows for several excursions, focusing on recent shifts in museum displays connected to trans-regional approaches and narratives. The program examined topics such as the history of the Berlin Zoo as a place of animal display, exoticism and orientalism in spaces of leisure of the 19th and 20th centuries as well as of exploration of natural history, with Historian Clemens Maier-Wolthausen. With him, the program discussed his exhibition Zoo Stories in Times of Empire, Dictatorship, and Democracy. The phase of transferring key collections of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin to the Humboldt Forum and the planned re-conceptions of the Museumsinsel were be assessed in discussions and meetings, e.g. with Lars-Christian Koch at the Ethnologisches Museum, with the curators of the Museum für Asiatische Kunst and with Stefan Weber at the Museum für Islamische Kunst. On an excursion to Hamburg, curators Roger M. Buergel and Sophia Prinz (Art Histories Fellow 2018/19) gave an insight into the making of Mobile Worlds: Or the Museum of our Transcultural Present at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe. This was followed by a discussion with Barbara Plankensteiner, director of Hamburg’s Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt (formerly Museum für Völkerkunde), about the current exhibition First Things and the re-conceptualization of the museum’s display.
